Paths of Obedience: Fairy Tales and the Monk's Way by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

“God writes straight,
even on crooked lines.”                

[Cont. from page 3] ... Anima failed.  There is no denying it; not if we take our stand on the storyteller’s own ground. One need not deny, of course, that in a sense this failure led to growth for Psyche.  Yet, it is not the element of disobedience that leads to a happy ending after all, but rather a turning away from it, a change of heart.         

Contemplating God’s plan in which even sin has its function, Augustine marvels: “Even sin!” – Etiam peccata! Paul Claudel paraphrases Augustine with a Basque proverb: “God writes straight, even on crooked lines.”  We should not rob this insight of its power by making it appear as if failure had been the inevitable, even the originally intended course of events.  The paradise towards which we go casts no shadow on the one we lost.  What our bliss would have been, we shall never know.  Enough for Anima that, even after her fall, “the god her lover left her,” not lying on the earth, “but gave her hope.”         

It is hope that is tested in Psyche’s second trial. Our myth, as it stands, leaves us little doubt that Psyche has failed, as the biblical myth leaves little doubt that Adam and Eve have fallen into sin.  Yet in both stories there remains a ray of hope. Here, Eros promises to destroy the wicked sisters, “but you,” he says to Psyche.  “I will only punish thus—by flying from you.”  This flight of Eros from Psyche is an intriguing variation on Francis Thompson’s theme of the Hound of Heaven.  In the very flight from her, “this tremendous Lover” pursues Anima, here too,” down the nights and down the days,” as day and night she seeks him. The paradox of hope is this: Anima’s divine lover pursues her by fleeing from her.         

According to the logic of the heart, his pursuit of her must necessarily take the form of flight, or else the hopes she has might be mistaken for the Hope he is.

All which I took from thee I did but take,

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.  (1)

In its own imagery our story develops the purification of Psyche’s hope.  As Eros flies away, Psyche follows him with her eyes until, blinded by tears, she can see him no more. In despair she casts herself, then and there, headlong from the brink of a river.  Again she has failed.  The test of her hope starts out with failure.  “But the kindly stream...to do honor to the god who sets even waters ablaze with his fire, quickly caught her up in its current and laid her unharmed upon a bank deep in flowering herbage.”  It is here that Psyche’s long wanderings begin.         

Wide open to the road ahead of her, Psyche sets out on her journey of hope.  The divine Lover whom she seeks secretly guides her steps and keeps stripping her, one by one, of all her hopes, to make her completely empty, ready to receive him.  This stripping takes the form of Psyche’s encounter with the Great Mother.  Hope is a motherly virtue. Under three different aspects Psyche must meet the mother goddess: as Demeter, Hera, and Aphrodite.  I see in this threefold repetition more than the fairy tale’s fancy for the number three. Only by putting earth, sky, and sea together can the myth bring out the cosmic fullness of the mother image.  Demeter gives fruitfulness to the earth; Hera is queen of the Heavens; Aphrodite was born from the foam of the sea.         

But there is also a stepping up in the sequence of the three encounters.  Wandering after her lost lover, Psyche sees a temple high on a mountain and says, “How do I know that my lord may not dwell there?”  It is a temple of the great Earth Mother, and Demeter appears to Psyche, but will not let her stay even for a short rest.  She must go on.         

In a deep valley, Psyche, comes upon another temple, where she begs Hera, goddess of matrimony and of childbirth, for asylum.  But again her hope is shattered: She must be on her way. Deep in her heart she knows that she will have to face the divinity under the very aspect that causes all her trouble: Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love.  Wishing “to leave no path of fairer hope untried, however doubtful it might be,” she had approached the sacred portals of Demeter and Hera.  But she knew that no darkness could hide her safely from “great Aphrodite’s inevitable eyes.” Now she says to herself: “Your little hopes are shattered. Renounce them boldly!”  With this boldness of hope, purged of all hopes, and preparing herself for certain death, Psyche stands at last at Aphrodite’s portal.

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